S3 SuperSavage MX/IX Mobile 3D Accelerator

DuoView+ & DVD Performance

Although multi-monitor support has become the most recent fad in the desktop market, it is a feature that has been around in one form or another for quite some time in the mobile market.  If you think about it, the ability to output to a laptop screen, TV display, or a regular CRT monitor is basically what Matrox's DualHead, NVIDIA's TwinView or ATI's HydraVision allow you to do on your desktop (without the laptop screen of course).  At the same time, those functions have historically been present on most well rounded laptops.  The SuperSavage is no different and in fact, it builds upon the original mobile Savage's DuoView technology to offer even more flexibility.

The SuperSavage's Enhanced DuoView+ technology allows the following configurations:

1)                  Laptop display + external CRT

2)                  Laptop display + external LCD

3)                  Laptop display + external TV

4)                  Laptop display + external CRT + external LCD (using an external TMDS transmitter)

Under Windows 9x, the SuperSavage's DuoView+ supports independent refresh rates, color depths and resolutions across the multiple displays however we couldn't get a firm confirmation on whether the same is true under Windows 2000.  As you will know from our Dual Display Comparison, those same features aren't as easy to come by under Windows 2000 simply because of limitations in the OS requiring software workarounds.

The DVD performance of the SuperSavage should be respectable as it uses a tweaked version of the Savage4's Hardware Motion Compensation engine.  Remember that the SuperSavage still does not have support for inverse Discrete Cosine Transformation (iDCT) in hardware, meaning that the tip of the hat will go to ATI here who does have a very powerful HWMC and iDCT engine in hardware.

Where, when and Drivers

The SuperSavage is currently running in S3's labs at full speed (143/143MHz) with their 128-bit SDR parts and around 75% of full speed with their 64-bit DDR parts.  There shouldn't be too much to worry about on that end since they are not expecting mass production until the end of April.  Even at that point, you shouldn't expect to see notebooks based on the SuperSavage MX and IX solutions until the third quarter, which is still a few months down the road. 

The SuperSavage will appear in the usual set of OEMs including IBM, Toshiba and Gateway - basically those manufacturers that are currently using Savage MX/IX parts.  S3 specifically mentioned that Dell would not be featuring their SuperSavage solution, as they are primarily an ATI house.  It will be very interesting to see if even NVIDIA will be able to tempt Dell away from using ATI in their notebooks, but judging from their refusal to offer AMD based systems, it doesn't seem likely.  

The SuperSavage driver set currently features a fully functional OpenGL ICD and is based off of the Savage4 drivers with necessary improvements of course.  That is the extent of what we can report on the drivers, however we are working on securing an early notebook sample to perform some of our own tests on at which point we can give you a more subjective look at driver quality.